In the manufacture of plastic coated containers of the type disclosed in said patent, glass bottles or like containers are preheated or conditioned to temperature above ambient temperature and conveyed in a vertical upright position by a ware handling conveyor which has spaced chucks thereon. The chucks grip the bottles by the neck finish and the conveyor carries them in single file past a sleeve making apparatus. The sleeve making apparatus receives a continuous web of the oriented heat shrinkable plastic, preferably a foam having some stiffness, that has been preprinted with a desired decoration. The machine cuts successive lengths of the material from the web and feeds them to individual mandrels on a rotary turret. Each cut length of the material is wrapped around the periphery of the mandrels so that the leading and trailing ends overlap and the ends are united to form a cylindrical sleeve with its axis disposed vertically. The mandrels move in registered position with containers on the conveyor in an assembly station wherein the conveyor path is in overlying relationship with the path of the underlying mandrels. The sleeves are stripped axially from the mandrels and telescopically placed about the bottle such that a lower end portion overhangs the bottom end of the bottle. In this fashion, the bottle and sleeve are conveyed by the ware conveyor to an oven or like heating device and heated sufficiently to shrink the plastic sleeve snugly and firmly about the exterior of the bottle.
Various devices have been employed to assure the position of the sleeve on the bottle from the time the sleeve is initially assembled until it shrinks. Zonal heat bands have been used with some success, such as is disclosed in the copending application of R. A. Ashcroft, Ser. No. 464,224, filed Apr. 25, 1974 (now U.S. Pat. No. 3,959,065), which is of common ownership with the present application.